Economic warfare is defined as “the use of, or the threat to use, economic means against a country in order to weaken its economy and thereby reduce its political and military power.”

Such nonmilitary, yet essentially warlike activity includes the use of economic means to compel a given adversary to alter its policies or behavior or to undermine its ability to conduct normal relations with other countries.

These economic means stop short of outright and overt physical engagement or battle, but they seek remedies and have real, measurable consequences; some of those measures today take an electronic or digital form in the case of crypto war.

Common forms of economic warfare include trade embargoes, boycotts, sanctions, tariffdiscrimination, the freezing of capital assets, suspension of aid, the prohibition of investment and other capital flows, and expropriation.

Trump has used all of them, and more often than past presidents; they have come to define both his own image and his very foreign strategy. READ it HERE

Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed monologue last week leaves much to be desired. But factual errors or rhetorical excesses are not why it attracted vociferous criticism on the American Right. What really set the critics off is Tucker’s underlying moral premise: American republicanism sometimes requires public restraint of private vice, even in the sphere of economics.

The fact that this is even a debatable premise speaks volumes as to why American conservatism has struggled to become a majority for nearly 90 years. And the fact that this is the bottom line of President Trump’s approach to economics speaks more volumes as to why he swept the Republican field and won the White House.

Carlson and Trump agree that American business owners have long since stopped thinking they owe anything to American workers or communities because they are American. They contend too many American executives, responsible only to shareholders who in turn value only the highest monetary return possible, are unconcerned about whom they contract with so long as the contracts are upheld. Nearly everyone concedes this is how business operates today; the question is whether correcting or influencing this is a proper matter for public action.

Dr. Beth Mynette, a mom from Washington, D.C., is making new bombshell allegations against her soon to be ex-husband, Tim Mynett, and self-proclaimed "intersectional feminist" Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The claims made by Beth specifically relate to the intimate relationship between the "colleagues" and how it's destroyed her marriage, according to the New York Post.

Beth Mynette alleges that Tim, a political consultant to Omar since 2018, admitted having an affair with the freshman congresswoman to his wife back in April and even declared his love for her. Despite Beth's attempt to "fight for the marriage" and work things out, her disgraced husband proceeded with the divorce filings.

After roughly seven years of marriage, the couple physically separated around April 7 of this year, just after Tim delivered the news to Beth on his alleged affair and proclaimed love for the congresswoman. Omar also separated from her husband recently, according to reports.

The former couple has a 13-year-old son together whom Beth is seeking primary custody of due to Tim's "extensive travel" with Omar, which is not part of his job description, according to the documents.

We have long ago become inured to Democratic politicization of mass shootings and the accompanying tirades against President Trump suggesting he is somehow responsible for these atrocities. Consequently, the Left’s exploitation of the recent massacres in the cause of gun control was all too predictable. This time, however, they added a new ruse to their rhetorical repertoire. After El Paso and Dayton, Democrats failed to dissuade Trump from visiting the victims, an omission they would have inevitably denounced as callous, the Left went berserk when he and the First Lady posed for a photo with an infant survivor of the El Paso shooting and two relatives.

The phony outrage erupted when the First Lady posted a tweet about the El Paso and Dayton visits that contained a photo featuring herself holding the baby, Paul Anchondo, and his Uncle Tito with his arm around the president. Why would this upset anyone? Well, it turns out that Tito Anchondo, like his brother Andre — who was killed shielding his son from the gunfire — is a Trump supporter. This photo undermines two carefully cultivated leftist myths: that Hispanics by definition disapprove of Trump and that he is a Mexican-hating racist. This was too much for the Democrats and their media allies, who, with characteristic hypocrisy, attacked Trump for politicizing the tragedies.

But as NPR reported, Tito Anchondo doesn’t see it that way and suggests that his brother would also have rejected the claim: “My brother was very supportive of Trump.” To Democratic claims that Trump’s rhetoric has incited mass shootings, he said, “I think people are misconstruing President Trump’s ideas.” He also told NPR, “We should be coming together as a country at this time instead of threatening each other with hate messages.” Anchondo told the AP on Friday that Trump “was just there to give his condolences and he was just being a human being.” The Democrats aren’t having any of this, of course. READ it HERE

I wrote here at Crisis back in March 2018 about the all-too-common link between mass shooters and fatherlessness. That was in the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida incident. Looking at a list of the worst mass shooters in U.S. history, it was clear that the vast majority came from broken families lacking a consistent biological father throughout their rearing and development. Very few had good, stable dads.

That’s a sad situation. It’s also sad, I noted, that our culture’s fundamental transformers are dedicated to a new family structure that, by definition, deliberately excludes dads. Same-sex-“married” mothers are homes without dads. Worse, the cultural revolutionaries are also committed to fostering homes that deliberately exclude moms: same-sex-“married” fathers are homes without moms. And if we dare urge caution or question the wisdom of these structures, then we’re the insensitive ones. More than that, we’re bigots, homophobes, haters.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that every fatherless home is a dead-ringer candidate to produce a mass shooter. That would be a ridiculous generalization. There is, however, a long-acknowledged pattern of notable social problems for children raised in fatherless homes. READ it HERE

In Wednesday evening's Democratic presidential debate circus, the left's favorite darlings turned on one another with a selfish vengeance, which was a positive development for the country and mildly entertaining. The glorious infighting continued among progressive commentators.

This acrimony, coupled with the public exposure of the left's crazy ideas, surely diminished the party's image among sane voters. The more leftists reveal their inanity and extremism, the better for President Trump and the nation. As one lifelong-Democrat African American caller told Rush Limbaugh the day after the debates, "The Democratic Party is no longer recognizable to me."

The consensus was that frontrunner Joe Biden was verbally awkward, tripping over numbers and phrases, and providing confusing instructions to viewers seeking to sign up for text message updates from his campaign. While fellow Democrats gave Biden a pass for his politically incorrect comments during his term as vice president, he got no such slack for his debate faux pas.

To be fair, however, you don't have to do much these days to run afoul of progressive thought police. All it took was for Biden to tell Kamala Harris as she was introduced to the stage, "Go easy on me, kid." Biden was obviously referring to Harris' aggressive attacks on him during the previous debate and playfully, even deferentially, asking her to soften her blows.

Virtue-signaling liberals were compelled to evince indignation. BAFTA Award-winning television writer Dominic Mitchell tweeted, "Kid? She's a grown woman Biden. Come on, man. Don't be such a sexist wuss straight out of the 1950s." Another Twitter user said Biden used a "single sentence quip intended to simultaneously diminish Harris and characterize her as overly aggressive. He'll say it was a joke, which is what his supporters will claim while belittling critics as humorless and aggressive. Women know it well." Rev. Laura Everett was harsher, tweeting, "'Go easy on me, kid' may pass to some as folksy banter, but underneath is centuries of sexism and racism, and a presumption of privilege where niceness avoids critique." READ it Here

The Trump versus “the squad” brouhaha merely affirms what pundits have been saying since Trump’s MAGA movement swept up the American Right in 2016: American politics, from here on out, is American nationalism versus multiculturalism. A drift on the American Right towards nationalism, and deeper polarization between multiculturalism and nationalism, seems inexorable.

Trump’s “go back” tweets and the ensuing chaos expressed a widely felt frustration on the Right—a feeling that led to Trump’s election in the first place. That frustration is with the fundamental unfairness of America’s current multiculturalist regime.

Multiculturalism declares that America is for “everyone,” except, of course, for those it pointedly excludes. Trump’s base are the Great Excluded. Until Trump came along, they were up for grabs politically, waiting for someone who cared about them and what they care about.

Leftists balk at the “bigotry” of Trump and his supporters. To them, nationalism is vulgar, uncouth, and racist by definition. They dismiss Trump supporters as racist. The Left’s lazy recourse to labeling everything “racist” says more about diversity politics than about the people leftists constantly slander.

Many on the Left now find it incontrovertible that Trump, and all his supporters, are xenophobes.

Republican support for Trump went up after his tweets. How could so many Americans be so hateful? But these charges merely add insult to the injury of the Left’s abuse. What about leftist racism and bigotry? Doesn’t that count?

Certainly not, interjects the polite, well-educated leftist. It isn’t possible to be bigoted toward certain groups, namely, those which enjoy the institutionalized hegemony of their colonialist ancestors, or whatever middlebrow shibboleths the badly educated are taught by their sociology professors to repeat. READ it HERE

It is wrong — morally, theologically, ethically — to disrespect people who have gotten older and who, apparently as a result, have lost an edge. With age comes life experience that prompts the emergence of wisdom, even as it also brings myalgia, arthralgia, and the general awareness that the human body has more things that can go wrong than does an automobile. Particularly painful is when a great mind shows some wear and tear rather the benefits and boons of maturing and improving from the years of acquired learning, cognition, and just-plain street know-how. There is no substitute for experience.

The Robert Mueller Circus on Wednesday thus was a human tragedy of many dimensions. I never knew the man he is said to have been, and I do not know him now. Sadly, apparently neither does he. His quiet retirement from public life and fading into the woodwork of social wall-paneling would have been a well-deserved phase, earned after decades of public service — except for one thing that justifies not letting him go gentle into that good night.

That one thing is that he allowed his name to be used for two years to do terrible damage. To our country. To our society. To the President of the United States. And also to certain individual human beings whose lives have been destroyed in his name, though apparently not by him. READ it HERE

The Obama-era Democratic Party bears little resemblance to the themes embraced just 11 years ago by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries.The parameters of marriage, in Obama’s words “between a man and woman,” has now transmogrified beyond gay civil unions to legal gay marriage to transgendered fixations.

Obama once protested that he was no king who could open the border and grant amnesties by fiat. Yet his view of immigration has metamorphosed well beyond DACA and Dreamers into Democratic candidates going into Mexico to escort aliens unlawfully into our country, and 500 sanctuary jurisdictions in which federal immigration law is all but null and void. An American citizen convicted of using a fake Social Security Number and phony ID is a felon who is all but unemployable; an illegal alien who commits the same crimes learns quickly that these are not deportable offenses and mostly never prosecuted. READ more HERE

It’s an article of faith among Democrats that the President’s base consists primarily of white working class voters without college degrees, and that they must be won back in order to beat Trump in 2020. This is why Elizabeth Warren inflicted that cringe-making, “I’m gonna get me a beer,” video on a long-suffering electorate. It is why Joe Biden, who reputedly enjoys a special rapport with blue collar voters, is the frontrunner for his party’s presidential nomination despite his penchant for gaffes and plagiarism. Thus, during this week’s Democratic debates, the candidates will devote considerable effort to courting the “deplorables.”

This will, however, be an exercise in futility because everything they believe about Trump’s base is false. Their view of this large and growing segment of the electorate is distorted by a myth concocted primarily by the media to explain away a deeply uncomfortable reality — that Trump possessed a better understanding of the public mood than did the professional political class. They were unable to abandon their preconceived notions about Trump and his supporters, despite easily accessible contrary data. The belief that his message was resonating only among the working class was debunked by Nate Silver as early as May of 2016:

It’s been extremely common for news accounts to portray Donald Trump’s candidacy as a “working-class” rebellion against Republican elites.… But the definition of “working class” and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump’s voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000.

That figure wasn’t merely above the national median household income, it was higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton’s supporters. Silver went on to point out that the general portrayal of Trump’s voters as uneducated also failed to conform to the facts: “About 44 percent of Trump supporters have college degrees… higher than the 33 percent of non-Hispanic white adults, or the 29 percent of American adults overall, who have at least a bachelor’s degree.” Blue collar workers were a real and valuable cohort of the President’s supporters, but the financial and educational make up of his base was more complex than most acknowledged. READ it HERE